Taiwan’s ministry of national defense (MND) caused a sensation during the preview of the 2011 Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition by displaying a billboard depicting an aircraft carrier, similar to China’s ex-Varyag, being blown up by a Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III anti-ship cruise missile.

It is very unusual for the Taiwanese to so blatantly highlight that its weapons are aimed at China, says one industry analyst, adding that the decision to use a Varyag image in the advertisement may have been an unintended mistake.

The Hsiung Feng III, which was developed by MND’s Chung Shan International Institute of Science and Technology, has only been shown in a public forum twice before, says an official from the institute speaking to Aviation Week on the sidelines of the show.

The missile is designed to penetrate an aircraft carrier and explode inside to cause maximum damage. The institute claims it only takes one or two of these missiles to sink an aircraft carrier.

Taiwan unveiled the missile to the general public the same day that China’s first aircraft carrier, the once-Soviet Varyag, set sale Aug. 10.

Taiwan’s defenses are focused on the island’s west coast, facing the Taiwan Strait and China, but the concern is that an aircraft carrier could be used to attack Taiwan’s east coast.

The Chinese military is either confident that it can already win a battle in the Taiwan Strait, or it is confident that it can keep winning the budget battles back in Beijing.

With the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag now mobile near the northern port of Dalian, China has joined the aircraft carrier club. And in completing the ship, with its limited use in narrow waters, the country has left behind one of the guiding principles of its defense acquisitions—that the first priority after nuclear deterrence is subjugating Taiwan.

Partly for that reason, the long-awaited appearance of the 67,500-ton vessel, symbolic of the country’s rising economic and military strength, has stoked anxieties across Asia as far as India. Beijing’s response: Other countries should just get used to the fact that China is developing carrier aviation.

As if to underline the doubtful value of an aircraft carrier in an attempt to force Taiwanese reunification with the mainland, a Hsiung Feng III missile was promoted as a “carrier killer” at the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition just as the Varyag headed to sea for the first time (see p. 26).

The ship, which will soon get a Chinese name and is officially earmarked for training pilots and deck crews, left Dalian on Aug. 10 for its sea trials, in which the builder will show that the ship meets specifications.

The investment in Varyag shows that the Chinese military is moving beyond its decades-old obsession with seizing Taiwan, says security researcher Ashley Townshend of the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “An aircraft carrier does not seem to be necessary for that,” he says, noting the land-based firepower that China can bring to bear on the island. “This means there is less focus,” he says.

So the carrier program could mean that China thinks it already has the pieces in place to secure the strait and bring Taiwan to heel. The alternative, which seems more likely, is that while the armed forces reckon much more military power is needed to force Taiwanese reunification—and to persuade the U.S. to keep out of the fight—they expect that future funding will be enough to do that and more.

Completing Varyag is unlikely to be just a one-time divergence from the focus on Taiwan, since three carriers will probably be needed to ensure that one is always available, Townshend argues. Reports of China building carriers from scratch have appeared from time to time over the years. The Washington Times ­cited unnamed U.S. defense officials this month as saying that construction of a Varyag-like carrier had begun.

Varyag’s long-awaited appearance raises two questions that have been asked repeatedly since China towed the hull to the shipyard at Dalian in 2002 with the evident intent of using it, somehow, to introduce fixed-wing aviation at sea. When will China have an operational carrier, usable as a fighting ship, and not just as a training ship? And why does China want carrier aviation anyway?

“When the ship will be operational is anyone’s guess,” says Townshend. It depends a lot on what level of competence the Chinese will demand before regarding the ship as deployable, he points out.

Taking a stab, analyst Richard Bitzinger of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University says: “It will probably be at least five years before there’s an operational capability.”

There is a strong clue that the Chinese navy does not expect to take too long in learning the notoriously difficult and dangerous business of efficiently operating fixed-wing aircraft at sea. For many years while Varyag was in dockyard hands, it was unclear how much effort would be spent on the ship, and how far it would be transformed from the empty hull that Chinese businessmen bought from Ukraine in 1998. It was conceivable, for example, that Varyag might have been made only structurally fit for service as a moored hull that pilots and deck crews could practice on. Or it might have been cheaply fitted with a modest powerplant and not much else, confining it to training excursions.

But as the ship runs its trials, it is evident that the navy has gone for the whole box and dice. Varyag has been fitted for combat—with self-defense surface-to-air missile launchers, a profusion of domes that must cover antennas for communications systems and sensors and, most notably, a phased-array radar. To integrate those systems, a capable command system must be installed deep in the hull. It seems unlikely that a navy that expected to take, say, 10 years to prepare the ship for combat would spend so heavily now on such costly equipment, especially since better systems would be available later.

It is also clear that China has not skimped on propulsion. Thick exhaust from the funnel during engine tests indicates that Varyag is not fitted with the gas turbines that Western and Japanese navies now routinely use for fast ships—and yet the exhaust color is too light for diesel propulsion, a heavy but inexpensive and efficient choice commonly made for ships of moderate speed. Diesels were an alternative that Chinese builders, expert in merchant ship construction, could easily have executed had the navy not wanted much speed, says U.S. Naval War College Prof. Andrew Erickson.

So the installation—reportedly built with Ukrainian help—is evidently a powerful steam-turbine plant, matched to the high-speed lines of the hull. Varyag’s sister ship, the Russian Kuznetsov, has a 147,000-kw (197,000-hp) steam-turbine plant that propels the ship at about 30 kt., compared with the 25-plus kt. officially stated for the two otherwise comparable ships that Britain is building. U.S. carriers are capable of more than 30 kt.

Erickson stresses the value of speed to a ship that, like Varyag, has a deck configuration requiring aircraft to use the mode of operation known as short takeoff but arrested recovery (Stobar). “Given the limitations of Stobar on aircraft weight, the more wind over the deck the better,” he says.

The Stobar configuration uses a ski jump instead of catapults. One of many British inventions that have made aircraft carriers workable, the ski jump effectively extends the flight deck into the air ahead of the ship. As aircraft hurtle off the ramp, they are not fast enough to fly, but their upward trajectory gives them time to accelerate before hitting the water. The energy from a catapult, however, allows greater weight—and therefore payload-radius.

The combat aircraft that will eventually appear on the Varyag will be the J-15, a Flanker version similar to, and maybe reverse engineered from, the Russian Su-33 naval fighter. Adapted for ski-jump takeoffs, it features canard wings and complex trailing-edge surfaces (AW&ST May 9, p. 35).

Like Kuznetsov, the operational Varyag may carry 40 or so aircraft, compared with more than 60 on U.S. carriers. The flight decks of the 102,000-ton U.S. Nimitz class ships measure 333 X 77 meters (1,092 X 252 ft.), compared with Kuznetsov’s 305 X 70 meters.

Limited payload-radius and other shortcomings would put Varyag at a disadvantage in action against a U.S. carrier, but such a battle must be the last thing on the mind of the Chinese navy. It seems likely that China expects to deploy its carriers in much the same way that the U.S. Navy, whatever its hot-war plans, has actually deployed its flat-tops during the past 60 years: as power-projection tools against enemies that could not hope to sink the huge ships, surrounded as they are by anti-air and anti-submarine escorts.

While Varyag and follow-on carriers would be helpful in intimidating rivals to China’s claims on the South China Sea, analysts Erickson, Bitzinger and Townshend agree that the most likely reason for China to build aircraft carriers is probably not far from the vague justification that the country is offering: Lots of other nations have them.

Aircraft carriers have proven useful to other countries. Moreover, China is a rising power, with a long view of history. It will want carrier aviation eventually, so it might as well start working on it. The reasoning is that “a rich nation should have strong armed forces,” says Bitzinger, who also thinks the ships would have some role against Taiwan.

"The Chinese J-15 clone is unlikely to achieve the same performance characteristics of the Russian Su-33 carrier-based fighter, and I do not rule out the possibility that China could return to negotiations with Russia on the purchase of a substantial batch of Su-33s"

Beijing is revealing pictures of its Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark design that is intended to populate the decks of its first aircraft carrier.

The J-15 is based on the J-11B, Shenyang’s unlicensed and indigenously adapted version of the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, and resembles its Russian equivalent, the Su-33 shipboard version, with a foreplane, folding wings, arrester hook and reinforced landing gear. Like the Su-33, the J-15 is designed to take off from a ski jump rather than a catapult. There are some differences from the Su-33, including more complex trailing-edge flaps and advanced Chinese avionics.

The unlicensed adaptation has been a source of friction with Moscow, says Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace with London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The J-15’s canards replicate those on the Su-33, indicating its flight control system is at least similar, Barrie says. Moreover, “a mock-up of the J-15 was seen carrying a dummy anti-ship missile, suggesting the J-15 may be intended to have a strike role from the outset, while the Su-33 was an air-to-air design.”

The heavy shipborne fighter will be yet another piece in the foundation of a ship-based force that can project power at sea, far from China’s shore defenses. They are expected to be first based on the former Russian Varyag aircraft carrier. The first pictures were taken at Shenyang Aircraft Industry Corp.’s No. 112 factory.

The design features exterior missile rails and a wide-angle holographic head-up display similar to those on the company’s J-11 fighter.

There are competing claims about the aircraft’s capability. Russian’s Ria Novosti news service called it inferior to the Su-33, but Chinese officials say the Su-33’s avionics are obsolete, so they have installed locally made sensors, displays and weaponry.

While based structurally on the Su-33, the aircraft features avionics — including an advanced anti-ship radar — from the J-11B program. Deployment is expected no earlier than 2016.

Analysts and aircraft watchers in China say the aircraft’s first flight was made on Aug. 31, 2009, powered by a Russian-supplied AL-31. Ukraine is the source of China’s Su-33/Flanker D, U.S. analysts agree.

“Russia’s carrier training is done in Ukraine at Saki, and for years there was one of the first prototype Su-33s sitting there,” one of the analysts says. “It disappeared a few years ago and likely ended up in China. The most recent photos of the J-15 show that they are either already entering low-rate initial production or close to it. I expect these [LRIP aircraft] to move to the training facilities soon and begin the long road to carrier qualification.”

The first takeoff from a simulated ski jump was conducted on May 6, 2010.

The program began after a Su-33 prototype was acquired from Ukraine in 2001. China offered to buy Su-33s from Russia as recently as 2009.

A Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man in February of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski jump ramp, according to the New York Times.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for short takeoffs.

“There are lots of photos of a [dry, ground-based] carrier training facility that has a static flight deck for crew training,” the U.S. analyst says. “The facility is shaped like a carrier, with the dormitories and classrooms below the flight deck. It already has both a Flanker mock-up and a helicopter [onboard] to qualify deck and maintenance crews for carrier operations. Another facility at Xian has the ski jump for carrier takeoffs and the arresting gear network for landings. We expect to see these J-15s do a lot of work there.”

Taiwan intelligence officials say the aircraft carrier — thought to be slated for a training role — could make its first voyage by the end of the year.

The warship has been docked in China’s eastern Dalian harbor, where it has undergone extensive refurbishing since 2002.

“The carrier is also interesting in that it appears to be fitted with a close-in [Club-type cruise missile] weapons system,” Barrie says.

U.S. intelligence analysts agree with the Taiwanese officials. “Just last month we started seeing the powerplants firing up, showing they are getting really close to going to sea trials sometime this year, [perhaps] as soon as this summer,” the U.S. analyst says. “They’ve also discussed a second carrier [indigenously built] using the knowledge gained from their work on the one they bought from the Russians.”

Images have emerged on various Chinese defence websites of what appears to be a testbed for a possible carrier-borne airborne early warning & control (AEW&C) aircraft.
The aircraft, apparently designated JZY-01, is based on the Xian Y-7 transport, the Chinese version of the Antonov An-26. A rough translation of the Chinese characters on the fuselage reads "demonstrator aircraft."

The two most notable features are a large circular radar dome mounted on a single mast aft of the wing root. It is unclear whether this is an operational radome, or a mock-up for testing aerodynamics.

The aircraft's tail has been highly modified and resembles the four vertical stabilizer arrangement found on the world's only carrier-capable fixed-wing AEW&C aircraft - the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye. Having four vertical stabilizers allows the E-2 to fit inside an aircraft carrier's hangar deck.

Notably, the JZY-01 appears to lack a tail hook, an essential piece of equipment for a carrier-borne aircraft. In addition, the landing gear would need to be heavily modified for carrier operations, and there is no indication the wings can fold.

China is conducting sea trials of a 60,000 tonne aircraft carrier that formerly served Russia as the Varyag. This ship, however, would be unable to support operations by large AEW&C aircraft because it relies on a 'ski-ramp' to launch aircraft. This limits fixed-wing operations to jet powered fighters, such as the Sukhoi Su-33 or China's Shenyang J-15.

The existence of the JZY-01 could suggest that China eventually intends to develop aircraft carriers equipped with steam or electro-magnetic catapults.

"The 'Liaoning' on Sept. 25, festooned with flags for its commissioning ceremony."

"Chinese president Hu Jintao attended the commissioning ceremony for the Liaoning on Sept. 25.
In this still from video broadcast on Chinese state television, he stands on the ship's bridge with military officials. "

China has carried out its first successful landing of a fighter jet on its first aircraft carrier, state media said on Sunday, a symbolically significant development as Asian neighbours fret about the world’s most populous country’s military ambitions.